Over dinner seven years ago during the American Geophysical
Union meeting in Washington D.C., six earth scientists, young women all, made a
loose pact. They had seen each other before, at various scientific conferences;
some had even collaborated on research. This time, though, they vowed they
would keep in touch.

Communicating mostly by email, they discovered they had a
lot to talk about. They came to rely on each other for advice in a field
dominated by men.

It was a support group of sorts, recalls Meredith Hastings,
assistant professor of geological sciences, who was at the dinner.
“You could talk about your research and your personal life, and issues
you faced in graduate school.”

Meredith Hastings
Inviting others to join their ad-hoc group, the women
realized they were hardly alone in facing career challenges in the earth
sciences. There were barriers to advancement, both unseen and deliberate. There
was frustration about balancing a career and a family. There was a paucity of
female role models in their field. And there were issues that only a woman
would have to navigate: How, exactly, do you approach your boss in a mostly male
workplace about creating a private area for pumping breast milk? “We clearly
struck a nerve with early-career women,” Hastings says.

From those conversations grew the Earth Science
Women’s Network (ESWN),
a peer-mentoring organization of female students and geoscientists in academia,
government labs, and private and nonprofit organizations. This month, the
National Science Foundation awarded the group nearly $1 million over four years
to expand its activities and outreach.

Brown will receive most of the grant money, just
under $600,000, to host and support the network, which now has more than 750
members. The funds will sponsor career development workshops, promote
professional networking opportunities, and create Web-based resources to
connect more women geoscientists. The NSF award “takes us to that next stage
that helps us with mentoring and elevating women in science,” says Hastings,
principal investigator for the grant.

Brown Associate Provost Pamela O’Neil, who wrote a letter
supporting the proposal, says women scientists often feel isolated. “The network provides a mechanism for women
to talk about critical issues they face in their careers,” O’Neil says. “The value is that it
helps keep women in science.”

The funding comes as the NSF, through its ADVANCE program,
seeks to increase the number of women who study science. There have been gains,
such as a recent rise in the number of women scientists earning Ph.D.s. But, Hastings
says, “we don’t see the same percentage of women getting into senior
positions.”

This so-called “leaky pipeline” was examined in a 2007
report from the National Academies, Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic
Science and Engineering. The study committee, which included Brown
President Ruth J. Simmons, discovered a number of factors behind women’s lack
of progress in the sciences. They included:

Women who are interested in science and engineering careers are lost at every educational transition.

Women on average hold less than 15 percent of tenure faculty positions in the social, behavioral, and life sciences, and dramatically less than that in all other fields of science and engineering.Women are very likely to face discrimination in every field of science and engineering.

Women faculty are paid less, promoted more slowly, receive fewer honors, and hold fewer leadership positions than men – discrepancies that are not based on any of the standard measures of performance.

Other, more subtle career inhibitors include a tendency
among women geoscientists to feel obliged to engage in activities that divert
them from their research. “It tends to be an issue with women scientists in
general,” says Christine Wiedinmyer, a scientist at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research who is on the ESWN leadership board. “We get asked to do a
lot in the community and for our organizations. Partially it’s because women are
needed [for diversity], and there aren’t a lot of us to serve.” In addition, she notes that women are
often good at outreach – another
reason they’re valued in committees and service.

Hastings says the ESWN also has discussed the complicated
emotions women face in balancing professional and personal lives – a choice, as
she calls it, between their “biological clock and their tenure-track clock.”
Such hard decisions can deter women from pursuing senior or tenure-track posts.

The network, Hastings says, will act as a sounding board for
early-career women geoscientists, whom she calls “the voice of a generation.” She adds, “I want that voice to be heard.”